Earlier this year, Anker, the Chinese company that makes EUFY security cameras, offered users money in exchange for videos of package and car thefts.
The popular maker of internet-bound security camera maker said it would pay $ 2 per video to train his AI systems To help thieves to better detect those cars and packages.
“To ensure that we have enough data, we are looking for videos of both real and staged events, to help the all the time to look out for”, the company wrote on its website.
“You can even make events by acting as a thief and donating those events,” is the website. “You can complete this quickly. Perhaps one act can be recorded at the same time by your two outdoor cameras, making it efficient and easy. If you also organize a car theft of a car door stage, you may earn $ 80.”
EUFY also wrote that “the data collected from these staged events are only used for training our algorithms and not for other purposes.”
This initiative shows that companies are willing to pay to get the data from users who, according to them, can be useful to train their AI models. Although this gives some users the opportunity to get value from their own data, there are security and privacy risks.
A good example: last week Techcrunch discovered that Neon, a viral bell app that offered money to users who were willing to share recordings and transcriptions of their calls, had a security error that uses users to access the data of other user. After he was warned about the security course, Neon went offline.
Hundreds of thousands of videos ‘donated’ to train AI
The EUFY campaign with $ 2 per video for theft videos ran from December 18, 2024 to February 25, 2025. More than 120 users responded to the announcement page of the campaign they had accepted, according to comments placed there by users there.
The aim of the company was to collect 20,000 videos, each of package thefts and from ‘pulling car doors’. EUFY users can participate by entering it A Google form Where they could upload videos and their PayPal account for payment.
EUFY did not respond to the requests of Techcrunch to comment and our questions, such as how many users participated in the campaign, how much money it paid that users did, how many videos the company collected and whether the company removed the collected videos after training its AI systems.
Since then, EUFY has aimed comparable campaigns on stimulating its customers to send videos to train their AI.
From the moment of publication, via another in-app campaign that EUFY is calling the video donation program to improve its AI systems, EUFY also offers user rewards that vary from a ‘student medal’, which simply appears to be a badge next to the name of the user in the app, to gifts such as cameras or gift vouchers.
EUFY only asks for videos with people for this campaign.
The EUFY app also shows a “Honor Wall” that ranks users who have donated the most video events. According to the app 201.531 videos, the leader of the ranking has donated.
On the page of the app for the donation program, EUFY clarifies that “donated videos are only used for all -training and improvement. EUFY will not deliver the video to third parties.”
So euphy asks users to donate Videos recorded with the company’s baby monitors. The support page with the steps to share the videos does not state any money remuneration for these videos.
EUFY did not respond when he was asked about this specific initiative.
There are reasons to be doubtful about EUFY’s commitments to protect the privacy of users. In 2023, The rack revealed That the company tried to hide that the camera flows of users, who advertised the company as end-to-end were coded, were non-coded when accessible via its web portal.
After a back and forth with the technical news site, Anker admitted that it misled and promised to solve the problem.
This article was originally published on October 1.
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